2020 – A Year of Learning, Change, and Growth

What a year it’s been for everyone. Things were going smoothly until March and then everything changed.

Covid-19 hit us and we were forced to change absolutely everything about how we live and work. We had to learn new ways to cope, stay safe, and take care of our mental health.

And yet, as the world came to a crawl, we started adapting, and as an industry, we found a new rhythm.

Our remote work timeline went from 2 years to 2 weeks

We had a vision, and a timeline to shift Ideaware to a 100% remote company by 2022. We had just started drafting plans when, well, you know what happened.

Sending everyone home to work, making sure they had everything they need to be productive, and coming up with processes was no easy task. For the first few weeks of our lockdown in Colombia, we were hard at work adapting.

We realized that our remote Fridays were a whole different ball game than remote work lockdown.

Eventually, we figured things out. And so did our customers.

I’m happy to say things are positively moving forward for our team and our customers, we’re now making plans to never require anyone to work at our HQ for 8 hours a day again.

Remote is here to stay for us. Most of our customers are not only also working remotely but many were already distributed before the pandemic, so this has made the transition easier for everyone.

With hard work, we’ve adapted

Most of us in the industry were already seeing remote as the future of work, but now that future is here. We’ve established new processes and new perks for the team to adjust to this new world.

We also now help every single team member (new or old) set up their home office. Ideaware provides desks, equipment, and subsidized internet for everyone.

Clients and team members

We are saddened by the global tragedy this year, we are also very grateful that 2020 has been a year of growth for us.

Since April, we’ve signed on 9 new clients whom we are currently building their software teams here in Colombia. We’re now hiring all over the country and this has made our expansion easier.

26 team members have joined us since April, and we’re very excited to have every one of you on board, keep rockin’.

Making our clients successful is our top priority, this year we’ve helped our customers make over USD 50M in revenue. That is huge for us, and for them.

Activities and team bonding

Along with our new processes and perks, we also had to move all of our learning and team bonding activities online. We’ve come up with:

Homespace

A place where anyone on the team can teach all of us anything they want (whether it’s industry-related or not).

Town halls

We get the entire team on a call and share company news, policies, and exchange a laugh or two.

We’ve also got together for some fun bonding activities:

Mario Kart Tournament

Friendship Day: Homemade Bread and Coffee

Halloween Cocktail Party

Santa’s Baking Workshop

2020 – a year of learning, change, and growth

Change is inevitable and this year takes the prize. We are grateful for all the opportunities that we’ve had this year, and especially very, very grateful to our old, current, and new clients (who we really consider partners) for trusting us. We trust you too and here’s to many years of partnership.

To our team – thank you. Thank you, and thank you again. This year has not been easy on you or your families. But we’ve stayed together, we’ve learned and now we’ve grown together.

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.” ― Paulo Coelho

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